DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — Nearly six months before the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series season opener at Daytona International Speedway, driver Stewart Friesen was sitting in a hospital bed enduring the most excruciating pain he’d ever felt in his life.
Yet despite serious injuries, brutal physical therapy and a long, painful road to recovery, Friesen was determined to return to NASCAR.
Friday night (Feb. 13) came the payoff after months of hard work.
Friesen strapped into his No. 52 Toyota Tundra and delivered, coming home with a top-10 result in his Truck return. In exiting his truck, you could tell Friesen’s competitive edge was back, just as sharp as his physical recovery.
He wanted more.
“We got a top 10 out of it,” Friesen told Frontstretch. “Not really what we wanted. We made some bad decisions in the draft. … Just tried to predict the unpredictable out here. It’s pretty wild.”
With that, the Canadian racer starts a new chapter after one of the worst crashes in his racing career. On July 28, 2025, Friesen was racing in a dirt modified when his car flipped and barrel-rolled before coming to a stop, erupting into flames before getting hit again by an oncoming competitor.
Friesen sustained a shattered pelvis held together by metal plate in his pelvis with nine screws, a tibia broken in three places, a broken fibula supported by a rod from his knee to his ankle and some nerve damage in his foot. Just the initial stay in the hospital to treat the injuries was nearly two weeks.
“I mean, it was excruciating,” Friesen said. “It was more than I’ve ever felt before, and yeah, I just knew instantly something was wrong.  … All of it [was hard]. Just to get in the wheelchair back to walking, crutches, into a cane. So when I really started to make some good progress and it was like, OK, week by week, I guess.”
Though the rehabilitation was hard, Friesen not once believed he would never race again.
“The goal was just to get as healthy as I could and then just check boxes off as we went,” Friesen said. “[Giving up racing] wasn’t really a thought. Getting back racing was all I wanted to do. So that was the goal.
“December, when I got cleared from my doctor … we really started making a plan to get back in the dirt car and trying to test that in January, which worked out. … Things started to fall in place again.”
And race again, he did.
In fact, win again, he did. On Wednesday night at Volusia Speedway, only a short drive away from Daytona, Friesen returned to victory lane in the DIRTcar Nationals race.
However, that success didn’t transfer over to the high banks in Daytona at first. Friesen was mired in the mid-20s throughout a majority of the night, and there were no stage points scored in the team owner’s NASCAR return.
“We got some damage in one deal out of [turn] 4 and then missed two or three other [crashes],” Friesen said. “Just a big thanks to the whole Halmar [Friesen Racing] team. Dustin [Dunn] did a good job calling the race. The guys did a good job getting the right front patched up a little bit.”
Near the end, however, the seas parted. As the attrition rate mounted, Friesen saw his opportunity and moved through the field. When the caution flag waved with four laps to go, the No. 52 Toyota had climbed up into ninth position and had two laps to make any additional moves, barring any chaotic spins that might occur in front of him.
In typical Daytona fashion, that’s exactly what happened. The race leader, Michael McDowell, got turned sideways right in front of Friesen’s bright blue truck, forcing the veteran to check up.
“It was wild,” Friesen said. “There’s not a lot of grip coming off [turn] 4, and about every lap, everybody’s sideways, they’re getting tight, and I saw McDowell there get sideways and then didn’t know if I was going to get collected. And luckily enough, we were able to sneak through.”
While he lost his momentum to get to the front, so did many other drivers near him. Friesen drafted his way around some more trucks before the end to wind up 10th — his first top 10 since Pocono Raceway last year, three weeks before that life-changing crash.
With his injuries, many may have thought to see Friesen’s racing career come to an end at age 42, if not reduced to part time.
But after six and a half months of some of the worst pain he’s ever felt in his life, the veteran is right back to where he left off before that violent crash in July: running up front in one of the most competitive racing series in the world.
And Friesen’s ready for more.
“I guess it’s always the inherent risk of being a race driver,” he said. “It’s what we do. I kind of figured out during the whole rehabilitation process, ‘All right, this is what I do and it’s what I’m going to keep doing.'”
Dalton Hopkins began writing for Frontstretch in April 2021. Currently, he is the lead writer for the weekly Thinkin' Out Loud column, co-host of the Frontstretch Happy Hour podcast, and one of our lead reporters. Beforehand, he wrote for IMSA shortly after graduating from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in 2019. Simultaneously, he also serves as a Captain in the US Army.
Follow Dalton on Twitter @PitLaneCPT
Being a racer is a great motivator for doing what is necessary to get back into the race car/truck. It gives you a goal to endure the pain and physical therapy.
Twice I had to do it, once for a racing injury and another for back surgery. A great motivator and a caring wife, made it possible.